May 1998 - October 29, 2015
Version 509.1312 is out today with some important new webclient stuff, including a long-awaited improvement to the rendering to bring it in line with Dream Seeker's pixel-friendly upscaling. (How it works: The containers for map objects and HUD objects are put in another container that's given a filter to force nearest-neighbor upscaling. Then that is put into still another container so the image gets scaled up to a nearest-integer size.) Some high-CPU games may find the new default rendering mode is a little too much burden, and may wish to default to the old behavior. For that you can set the rendering-mode=WebGL:low in the skinparams attribute for your map control (in a .dms file), or you can use winset() to do that. The new default is WebGL:high, for high quality.
In the process of setting up that rendering mode, I got a feel for what it'd take to implement my proposed plane-lighting idea in 510 in the webclient. Looks pretty straightforward; the hard part will be managing which icons go in which container objects. But this proves the concept is fairly sound, I think, so I'm pretty happy about that.
It's time to start brainstorming in earnest on how to bring 510's features about, as 509 is nearing completion and will soon be the stable build. I have some things in mind for the pager and Dream Maker, too, that have been on the back burner.
Tomorrow is Halloween, and in the US it's an extra-long one as the clocks go back to standard time at 2 AM that night. Gorge yourself on things that are bad for you, and play some classic scary BYOND games in the dark. And if you leave a box of donuts on your counter and the next morning find a bite out of the top of each one--especially the plain ones--you'll know that the spirit of Dust Bunny has visited your house.
Don't forget to hit up the donation box or become a Member if you haven't already. BYOND needs your support! Thanks to everyone who's helped out this month.
